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Arctic Melt, by Andy Armstrong, NOAA

Caution

All technical information and scientific data released by US Government agencies (e.g., NASA, EPA…) are subject to sudden variation because of political expediency.
This caution also extends to the fidelity of the information provided by UN organizations (e.g., FAO, WHO…).

WARNING!

Point of No Return:
Unless global energy consumption is reduced immediately to below 60EJ, mechanisms that are destroying ecosystems including ozone holes, global heating, extreme climate events... reach the point of no return, overwhelm the life support systems, render most cities uninhabitable by 2015 or earlier.

Obama is like morphine!

He wasn’t manufactured to cure your socioeconomic gangrene; he was prescribed to ease the pain as the corporate power cut off your limbs.

When we called President Obama the ‘Presidential Trojan Horse,’ and compared the White House with a McDonald’s franchise, Google blocked the posts. For the record, however, our descriptions have proven to be spot on! The corporate power has never been so abusive under the reign of just about any of Obama’s predecessors.

The Presidential Trojan Horse will carry the corporate power right inside, where they couldn’t reach before!

And to those of you who say, ‘ah, but we elected him!’ We say, face it; you had NO real choice!

Never much of a fighter against abusive corporate power, Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that right from his start as President, he wanted health insurance reform that received the approval of the giant drug and health insurance industries.

Earlier this year he started inviting top bosses of these companies for intimate confabs in the White House. Business Week magazine, which proclaimed recently that “The Health Insurers Have Already Won” reported that the CEO of UnitedHealth, Stephen J. Hemsley, met with the President half a dozen times.

These are the vendors. They and their campaign slush funds cannot be ignored in the power struggle over the legislation percolating in the Congress. One public result of these meetings was that the drug industry promised $80 billion in savings over ten years and the health insurance moguls promised $150 billion over the same decade. Mr. Obama trumpeted these declarations without indicating how these savings would be guaranteed, how the drug companies could navigate the antitrust laws and what was given to the health care industry by the White House in return.

We have now learned that one Obama promise was to continue the prohibition on Uncle Sam from bargaining for volume discounts on drugs that you the taxpayer have been paying for in the drug benefit program enacted in 2003.

Unknown is whether the health insurance companies were also promised continuation of Medicare Advantage with its 14% added taxpayer subsidy to induce the elderly to make the move out of public Medicare. Also unknown is whether the Medicare public option that Mr. Obama formerly espoused but since has wavered on has been put on the concession table.

The whole secret process is seedy and demonstrates cruel disregard for the millions of American who, whether in dire need of medical services or not, voted in “change we can believe in.”

By stark contrast, President Obama has never invited to the White House the leading consumer-patient champions in this country who favor full Medicare and free choice of physician and hospital—often called “a single payer” system. Open to the corporate barons who have failed decade after decade to deliver what patients need, the White House door is closed to the likes of Dr. Quentin Young—a founder of the Physicians for a National Health Program and an old Chicago friend of Obama’s, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who heads Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Drs. Marcia Angell, Stephanie Woolhandler, and David Himmelstein, who are nationally known and accomplished single payer advocates or Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the fast-growing California Nurses Association.

Mr. Obama even tried to exclude any advocate of a single payer system—previously favored by Obama and still favored by a majority of the American people, doctors and nurses—from his roundtable meetings convened to receive the views of different constituencies.

“Make me do it” was the advice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to reformers when faced with legislation he desired but did not have the votes for in Congress. Mr. Obama is not exerting that plea for people power. Were he to do that, he would be encouraging daily public hearings in the Senate and the House on the bureaucratic waste, greed, overbilling, collusion, and fraud that many in the corporate world have inflicted with their costly, pay or die health care industry.

Such publicized hearings would keep him on the offensive. It would arouse the public and focus energies on the main problem—the corporatization of medicine. This commercialism has left tens of millions of people without health insurance, caused 20,000 fatalities a year, and cost Americans twice or more per capita than have full Medicare systems in western countries, which have better health outcomes than the U.S.

Further indication of Obama’s corporate dealings is that he never identified himself with a specific bill with a House and Senate number that he could rally the people around. No wonder people are confused, frustrated and angry. President Obama did not stand for an unambiguous proposal.

He thereby emboldened both the cash and carry Blue dog Democrats to rebel and the Republican yahoos to launch their lies and distortions via Rush Limbaugh and similar trash media.

Obama is about to make his biggest mistake to date by favoring the bipartisan deal his assistants are working out with Blue Dog Senator Max Baucus and his Republican counterparts on the Senate Finance Committee. This proposal has no public option, no consumer protections or restraints on the mayhem and skyrocketing charges of the so-called health care industry.

Already the less corporate-indentured bills being reported from the House Committee by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his allies are getting short-shrift from a White House that clearly views the forthcoming Baucus-Grassley “compromise” as the “more practical” go-to legislation.

There is reliable word that the AFL-CIO will endorse whatever Obama approves, with the exceptions of the California Nurses Association and the Sheet Metal Workers’ union. The latter, through their president, Michael J. Sullivan, announced in late July that it was suspending all future campaign contributions to any candidate for Congress or the Presidency.

Already over sixty progressive members of the House, headed by Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) have declared opposition to these unacceptable compromises moving forward in both the House and the Senate.

So is gridlock around the corner? Will there be a health insurance reform of any stripe signed into law this year? It depends on the alliances that settle for the lowest corporate denominators being blocked by the unyielding principled stands of the progressives who want something that puts patients above the failed profiteering vendors.

The guess here is that Obama will sign anything which squirms through a cowardly Congress that cannot give to the American people in 2009 the health care system Congress stopped President Harry Truman from establishing in 1950.

It is up to the people of our country to “make him do it” whether this year or next. A mere one million immediate calls to members of Congress by one million assertive citizens will start sobering up these legislators who think they can get away with another sale of our public trust.

The Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121. The full Medicare, single payer bill (backed by nearly ninety legislators) is H.R. 676. The go-to citizen group for your sustained engagement is singlepayeraction.org. The rest is up to you, the majority, who want to put the people first.

Who will be in charge: Obama or Emanuel?

Who is Rahm Israel Emanuel?

Israel First Rahm Israel Emanuel (born 1959) is/was a dual Israeli/US citizen [Israeli paper Haaretz calls him an Israeli citizen] and a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 2003, representing Illinois’s 5th congressional district.

On November 6, 2008, Emanuel accepted an offer from President-elect Obama to become the White House Chief of Staff in Obama’s administration, which begins on January 20, 2009.

Open Secrets reports that Rahm Israel Emanuel “was the top House recipient in the 2008 election cycle of contributions from hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry”.

During his original 2002 campaign, Emanuel “indicated his support of President Bush’s position on Iraq …”

Emanuel is said to have “mailed a rotting fish to a former coworker after the two parted ways.” On the night after the 1996 election, “Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name.” His “take-no-prisoners attitude” earned him the nickname “Rahm-bo”.

Emanuel held a seat on the quasi-governmental Freddie Mac board, which paid him $231,655 in director’s fees in 2001 and $31,060 in 2000… During the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandal involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities…”

USA Today reported in late January 2007 that Emanuel failed to disclose that he was an officer of a family charity, a violation of law requiring members of Congress to report non-profit leadership roles. The charity does not ask for outside donations and is funded by Emanuel and his family.

Emanuel, whose father was in Irgun (a Zionist terrorist group), is a strong supporter of AIPAC, and personally introduced fellow Chicagoan President-elect Barack Obama to the organization’s directors during the 2008 presidential campaign. (Source: Wikipedia)

What other people say about Israel Rahm Emanuel

Christine Cegelis. Cegelis is an IT professional in the Chicago area who ran as the Democratic nominee for Congress against longtime incumbent Henry Hyde in 2004, winning an unexpected 44 percent of the vote. After Hyde announced he would be retiring, she attempted to run again in 2006, but Emanuel—then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—backed a Democrat less critical of the Iraq war, Tammy Duckworth, who defeated Cegelis in the primary. Duckworth ended up losing in the general election.

Swanson is co-founder of After Downing Street and Washington director of Democrats.com [not affiliated with the Democratic Party.]

He said: “Reuters quoted Republican strategist John Feehery happily predicting that Emanuel ‘is going to spend most of his time cracking Democratic heads, getting them to move from the left to the middle.’ It’s a reasonable prediction, because Emanuel has spent the past two years doing that on various issues, most notably Iraq. As chair of the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] in 2006, Emanuel directed campaign funding overwhelmingly to the more pro-war Democratic candidates and recruited opponents to run against promising anti-war candidates like Christine Cegelis and Jerry McNerney.

“In January 2007, as chair of the Democratic Caucus when the 110th Congress took office with the clearest anti-war mandate in national history, Emanuel spoke to the Washington Post, which reported: ‘Don’t look to Emanuel’s Democrats for solutions on Iraq. It’s Bush’s war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces.’ For two full years, ‘Emanuel’s Democrats’ maintained that ending the war on Iraq would require passing legislation, when in truth they could have simply stopped funding it, a conclusion reached by a hearing chaired by Senator Russ Feingold. Their pretense that legislation was needed, allowed the Democrats to blame the war on Republican senators’ filibuster power and presidential vetoes.

“Those excuse may be gone now, but my concern is what we’ve learned about Emanuel’s priorities.” (Source)

John V. Whitbeck. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of “The World According to Whitbeck”.

Whitbeck said: “Obama repeatedly pledged unconditional allegiance to Israel during his campaign, most memorably in an address to the AIPAC national convention which Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery characterized as ‘a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning’, and America’s electing a black president has always been more easily imagined than any American president’s declaring his country’s independence from Israeli domination.”

“A further contemptuous message is widely rumored to be forthcoming—the naming as “Special Envoy for Middle East Peace” of Dennis Ross, the notorious Israel-Firster who, throughout the 12 years of the Bush the First and Clinton administrations, ensured that American policy toward the Palestinians did not deviate one millimeter from Israeli policy and that no progress toward peace could be made and who has since headed the AIPAC spin-off “think tank”, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.” (Source)

Paul Craig Roberts

Roberts said: “In ‘Hail to the Chief of Staff,’ Alexander Cockburn describes Emanuel as ‘a super-Likudnik hawk,’ who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 ‘made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates.'”

“Obama’s election was necessary as the only means Americans had to hold the Republicans accountable for their crimes against the Constitution and human rights, for their violations of US and international laws, for their lies and deceptions, and for their financial chicanery. As an editorial in Pravda put it, ‘Only Satan would have been worse than the Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community, which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect for international law.'”

“But Obama’s advisers are drawn from the same gang of Washington thugs and Wall Street banksters as Bush’s. Richard Holbrooke …” (Source)

Ralph Nader

In A Letter to Senator Obama, Nader said: “You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an ‘undivided Jerusalem,’ and opposed negotiations with Hamas– the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored ‘direct negotiations with Hamas.’ Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote “Anti-semitism today is the persecu tion of Palestinian society by the Israeli state.”